97: The Local Spring Strategy

Helpful links: 

One-On-One 90 Minute Seasonal Intensive 

Membership $35/mo 

Episode Overview:

Spring is when families start actively searching for photographers again

Most photographers try to “grow online” but forget the power of going deep locally

You do not need to be famous. You need to be familiar in your communityBecoming “the photographer” is not about being the most creative. You need to be more visible, helpful, and trusted locally.

Today you’ll learn how to:

• Position yourself as a local resource (not just a service provider)
• Build visibility in real-world places and local digital spaces
• Create simple spring content that attracts nearby families
• Turn local attention into actual bookings

My Instagram + My Membership

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Late Start And Spring Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello. Okay, I apologize for missing last week. It was my birthday week and mid or winter break, and there was just a lot going on. And so I skipped it. And then this week I'm late because I went with my husband to buy a little work van for his handyman business. Um, so that surprisingly happened

Why Spring Searches Spike

SPEAKER_00 0:22

on Tuesday morning. So I'm here recording about local spring strategy. Really quickly, inside the membership, we just did a three-day training on spring, um, deciding your offers, picking your booking pass, and then lots of spring ideas. It was one hour over three mornings, and it's all recorded. So if you want access to it, you can just pop into the membership and it'll all be there. Um, so yeah, if you're if you're really stuck, then that that would be the place to go. Okay, so spring is unique as opposed to winter because some families, not all, but some families do start actively searching for family photography again. Like I've said before, generally in winter and late fall, after fall is really wrapping up, your visibility of people who are just have the idea pop into their head that they want family photography and searching for you is very low. Of course, that continues for maternity and newborn, um, but for general family photography, it's definitely a low visibility moment. Spring is really when those active searches start to pick up. So, what we want to do is make sure that when those people start arriving on our websites or looking, turning their head to look at us, that we have something to offer them. That if you are someone who does seasonal work, I'd say the majority of family photographers that I know, talk to, or help have at least uh one seasonal offer. And usually spring is a very popular time to have that offer. It could be kiddo portraits. I see like the personality type portraits in the studio. There's a lot of motherhood, mother's day, mommy and me, wildflower. For whatever reason, there's a lot of half sessions, slash mini sessions, slash seasonal sessions that happen during

Define A Seasonal Offer

SPEAKER_00 2:12

this time. So, what we're gonna be talking about in this episode is local strategy. Like, how do you become the photographer in your area for the types of sessions that you want? So the first is kind of a mindset shift. So when you are becoming the photographer in your town for your session types, it doesn't mean that you are competing with every photographer in your city. Somehow, when we start to become more possessive over our success, we can think of every other photographer as the enemy to that success. And I want you to do your very best to ignore what every other photographer in your town is doing and solely focus on thinking about owning a small specific market of people who want to do the types of sessions that you love to photograph. So you want people to name you in relation to the type of work that you do best. So one of the ways that you can start to get that attention beyond just talking about what you're offering is talking about your town and how to serve people in your town. Not only does this help you with the AI overview, but it really helps you to be seen as someone who is local and trustworthy and has a kid-centric business. If you're a family photographer, that can be really helpful. So one thing to do is to pick a local lane instead of trying to reach everyone. So if you're just focusing on talking to one type of person via a seasonal niche, so let's say moms who are trying to make spring fun for their kids. That could be who you're talking to if you need to have an audience in mind. So you're not trying to talk to every single human in your town. Um, you're just talking to moms and you're talking to moms specifically who like for for me, it would be like hikes and fun things to do because my brain, my brand

Pick A Local Lane

SPEAKER_00 4:00

is built on adventure and playfulness. So then you're starting to get the the general types of people who would hire you to turn towards you as a local resource and a kid-centric business. So the idea would be like you could say this sentence successfully to a group of people. This spring, I'm helping blank families blank. So it would be like this spring, I'm helping adventurous, fun families take photographs in all the beautiful Washington wildflowers that pop up in May and June. That would be an example. So then everything that you're building marketing-wise is kind of from that sentence. So it helps you with a little bit of specificity, then you can create this sort of helpful local content that's tied to what you're actually doing, not saying I'm a family photographer on Bainbridge Island. That is so general, it doesn't, it's hard to build a marketing plan of specificity around such a broad sentence. So the very first step is come up with a clear sentence about what you're doing this season. If you haven't already, define what you're offering. So for the vast majority of family photographers, I recommend that they have kind of a year-long ongoing offer and then a seasonal offer. That's like a really good pairing, not 10 seasonal offers. We really want to keep it as simple as possible. In the class today, which was the last day of the spring training in the marketing uh membership, I talked about how the average family photographer can only handle that amount of marketing workload. But in our brain, we may have 10 different things we want to try. The trick is narrowing it down and really trying to do one thing really, really well. One offering that you market very well, one or two, not 10, right? Because the average brain just can't create enough visibility to fill all of those offers. Okay, so let's talk about local visibility buckets. So these are like how you can think about this visibility in

Craft A Clear Spring Sentence

SPEAKER_00 6:03

grouping. So the first is like local content. That would be like come along with me content as I go around the town and tour these coffee shops or go to this bookstore or interview this pediatrician, like whatever it is where you're tying yourself to local eyes. So you could try to solve spring-related problems of local people, best spring parks, rainy day activities, what to wear for spring photos, favorite kids uh friendly coffee shops or play spaces that are open during spring break. All of these things are like you just weaving in your local availability, your local expertise, your session availability, and your offer, all in sort of this local content bucket. That's the one bucket. The second bucket is local relationships. So think about two or three, not 400, just two or three local relationships that you could start to form with other local businesses who are serving the same kind of person that you are. Kids' clothing boutiques, pediatrics office, preschool, mom groups, play cafes, hair salons, like anywhere that is focused on kids. You can think like, hey, it would be fun to build a relationship that bounces people back and forth, or I introduce you to my audience, you introduce me to your audience. So you, this is much easier to do. These relationships are much easier to foster if you can be really clear about who you

Keep Offers Simple

SPEAKER_00 7:28

are and who you help. So that is why this initial part of this conversation matters so much. Because if I go and I I get over all my fear of rejection and everything, and I go to a I go somewhere like a preschool or a daycare, and I'm like, hey, I would love to partner with you. And they're like, cool, what do you do? And I'm like, I'm a family photographer. And there, and then it feels like it's their job to try to figure out what the partnership will look like. For each of these, you would want to have an idea of what a cool partnership or even introductory to each other's audiences would look like. What are the logistics? How would you do it? So that you're not taking that person and being like, here, I and I came up with the idea, now you plan it. It should be your idea that you're approaching them with, make it easy for them to say yes. Yes, it'll be beneficial to both of you, but I think sometimes it starts off as too small and then it gets lost in the details. Like people just don't have the bandwidth to plan the whole thing out. So take that bandwidth on yourself. These collaboration ideas could include shared email shout-outs. So like you pop on each other's email list if you both do email lists. You could do an in-store pop-up, you could do a giveaway that includes something from their business, you could do a mini day that's sponsored by their business in your um in your studio or even outdoors. You could be like, if you partner with a florist, you could be like, these flowers are donated by this company, and then everybody who comes to the session gets a little card about that company, that sort of thing.

Three Local Visibility Buckets

SPEAKER_00 8:56

A KDB is simple as a guest blog post or a newsletter feature, right? So it doesn't have to be super complicated, but it's about how do you get more local eyes who are already looking at their business to turn their head and look at you. So you're not asking them for favors, you're offering value to their audience and vice versa. So that's the way to think about it. Okay, the third bucket is a local digital presence. So that means you need to make sure that you're updating your Google profile with spring photos added to that Google profile. You need to make sure that you're writing um spring and local centered blog posts and ideally updating your home page to reflect what you're currently offering. The amount of times that on a family photographer's Instagram page, it's spring, spring, spring, spring, spring. These are my sessions, these are my minis, these are my motherhood event, and I go onto their website and it's nowhere to be found. That's very common. You want families to see in multiple places search, social, uh, their email inbox, real life, that sort of repetition as people keep experiencing you as the local resource, that builds trust. Okay. So part four is your simple spring local plan, kind of a little framework. So for example, it could look like one local Instagram poster reel, one helpful story or tip, one reach out to a local business, sharing spring availability, one or two new Googles, new images to your Google profile, Google business profile every single week. And then you have covered multiple buckets right there. And that's more than I would say 95% of family photographers are doing. What most family photographers are doing is they stop at the top, one Instagram poster reel, or one story, or maybe two, and then there's nothing else. There's no other repetition through multiple places that anyone is achieving. So the conversion of taking this local tension, this local visibility, and turning into bucket bookings means that you are always, no matter what you're doing, including what we can call like next step language. So you're talking about this offer all the time because people we know people need to see things multiple times before we book them. So you can use these ways that you're reaching out with people. So it can be like if you guest write a blog post, you could say the author Fiona, a local photographer who is now offering spring sessions linked to book. So it's always in that. That next step is always included with clear availability, what your offer is, an obvious way to get on the calendar or book. Encourage people to take the next step with like excited language. Like I can't wait to I can't wait to explore beautiful Seattle areas with you in spring. The wildflowers start to pop off in June. Feel free to reach out to me to grab a session or learn more on this blog post. Like that is part of whatever outreach you're doing, is you're coming at it from the point of view of what you are booking. Okay, so it's gonna be kind of a short session, but I feel like or short um

Local Content That Serves Families

SPEAKER_00 12:04

a short episode, but I feel like what most people need to do at this particular time, we're in the last week of February, is get spring offers decided and start talking about them. So spring has to be more marketing work than summer or fall generally, because in summer people are out of school, they're not dealing with so many logistics, they're thinking about how beautiful the outdoors are and everything's warm. And yes, we could run around and do a playful session, and fall has that native holiday card energy that will never be squandered and you could always rely on people booking during fall. But spring takes a little bit more convincing. And so, more than any other season, beyond winter, which I'd say is the hardest ever, you need that runway to be able to talk to talk about things multiple times. So if you start now, then you'll give yourself that. If you keep waiting to know everything, to have perfect clarity, to feel extremely motivated and confident, you will just wait and wait and wait, and then you will be in the bucket of people who are just clambering for last minute, super heavily discounted wildflower clients because you just want to do something. So we want to avoid that. The way we avoid that is actually coming up with strategic marketing and implementing it now. Okay, so the other thing I'm gonna be doing is creating a few spring-centered one-on-one um meetings that are just I'm gonna do an hour and a half where we'll meet and we will talk about spring. I'll look at your website, we can talk about your offers, and hopefully at the end of the call, you'll be like, okay, I know what I'm offering and how I'm gonna market it. Those that's the goal of these calls. I'm only gonna offer a handful of them. So if you want one, you can snag one. I'll put the link in the show notes of how to get onto one of those calls. And if you just feel like you need more help now, but you don't have the uh funds to do a one on one, the membership's $35. And in there you will find three hours of recorded spring centric marketing planning that we've just worked on together. Okay, hope you guys have a good week.